Laura Sobbott Ross
Trees
You’ll notice it in a way
that makes you catch your breath
at the window, where you might be
licking an envelope, or folding laundry--
doubling the gym socks into a soft knot
the size of your own heart. More
predictable than weather, those trees,
the familiar perimeter of your existence.
Meristem and bud. Small voices
loft and tangle there in the atmosphere
of leaf. Mitosis, a word that sounds like
something un-sleeved with doves & smoke,
not the way trees and children grow.
You wonder if they’ll notice the trees
before the vanishing point of the horizon.
When they’ve gone without looking up
through the broken clouds of autumn,
across the same shadows they once passed
through on bikes and in yellow buses,
the trees will remain, a stoic presence
betrayed only by wind and birdsong.
You breathe— a symbiotic universe
exchanging sighs. Do you feel them
leaning in? The years, a thicker want?
Your tipped equilibrium of elements gone
earth-heavy. Inside, all you have embraced--
a circumference of rudimentary ripples,
histories scored in a graph of echoes.
You’ll mark your days in lengths of shadow,
your seasons in what loosens and returns.
Laura Sobbot Ross teaches at Lake Technical College in central Florida, and has worked as a writing coach for Lake County Schools. Her writing appears in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, Blackbird, The Florida Review, Calyx, The Columbia Review, Natural Bridge, Tar River Poetry, Cold Mountain Review, and many others. She won The Ledge Poetry Award 2013. Her chapbook, A Tiny Hunger, was the winner of the Seventh Annual YellowJacket Press Chapbook Contest for Florida Poets, and she has a chapbook, My Mississippi, forthcoming from Anchor & Plume Press. She has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.
Trees
You’ll notice it in a way
that makes you catch your breath
at the window, where you might be
licking an envelope, or folding laundry--
doubling the gym socks into a soft knot
the size of your own heart. More
predictable than weather, those trees,
the familiar perimeter of your existence.
Meristem and bud. Small voices
loft and tangle there in the atmosphere
of leaf. Mitosis, a word that sounds like
something un-sleeved with doves & smoke,
not the way trees and children grow.
You wonder if they’ll notice the trees
before the vanishing point of the horizon.
When they’ve gone without looking up
through the broken clouds of autumn,
across the same shadows they once passed
through on bikes and in yellow buses,
the trees will remain, a stoic presence
betrayed only by wind and birdsong.
You breathe— a symbiotic universe
exchanging sighs. Do you feel them
leaning in? The years, a thicker want?
Your tipped equilibrium of elements gone
earth-heavy. Inside, all you have embraced--
a circumference of rudimentary ripples,
histories scored in a graph of echoes.
You’ll mark your days in lengths of shadow,
your seasons in what loosens and returns.
Laura Sobbot Ross teaches at Lake Technical College in central Florida, and has worked as a writing coach for Lake County Schools. Her writing appears in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, Blackbird, The Florida Review, Calyx, The Columbia Review, Natural Bridge, Tar River Poetry, Cold Mountain Review, and many others. She won The Ledge Poetry Award 2013. Her chapbook, A Tiny Hunger, was the winner of the Seventh Annual YellowJacket Press Chapbook Contest for Florida Poets, and she has a chapbook, My Mississippi, forthcoming from Anchor & Plume Press. She has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.